Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture An All-American journey through Blackness, whiteness, Christianity, Judaism, slavery and freedom
Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family By Laura Arnold Leibman Oxford University Press, 320 pages, $27.95 Race has always been an important category in American life. But its contours have never been fixed. Laws denoting who should be classified as white — or Black — have varied from state…
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Culture In World War II Berlin, a little-known story of German resistance
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler By Rebecca Donner Little, Brown and Company, 576 pages, $32 Since childhood, Rebecca Donner had known that she was heir to an important – and little-known — story of World War II…
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Culture How a Jewish spy infiltrated the U.S. atomic program — and helped the Soviet Union build the bomb
Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away By Ann Hagedorn Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $28 Was the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s nothing but political hysteria? For all its deleterious effects on free speech rights, reputations, and careers, it seems not. Cold War fears of the domestic threat…
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Culture Ravaged by Alzheimer’s, a star professor tries to remember how to love
Morningside Heights By Joshua Henkin Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $26.95 One of the terrors of aging is the prospect of Alzheimer’s disease. An even worse scourge, though, is the variant of the disease that afflicts the merely middle-aged – the brutal early-onset Alzheimer’s so memorably embodied by Oscar winner Julianne Moore in the 2014 film…
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Culture A Holocaust story of incredible luck, breathtaking bravery and incalculable loss
My Name is Selma: The Remarkable Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter and Ravensbrück Survivor By Selma van de Perre; translated by Alice Tetley-Paul and Anna Asbury Scribner, 224 pages, $27 And still the stories keep coming. At 98, Selma van de Perre has published her first book, a memoir about her activities in the…
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Culture After Kristallnacht, a hunger artist confronts a splintering world
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm; preface by André Aciman Henry Holt and Company/Metropolitan Books, 266 pages, $24.99 A feverish urgency infuses Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered novel about a frantic German Jewish businessman after Kristallnacht, an internal refugee whose doomed travels both echoed and prefigured the author’s own. Boschwitz’s Jewish father…
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Culture As in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ small disasters foretell the destruction of a world
The Slaughterman’s Daughter By Yaniv Iczkovits; translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf Schocken Books, 515 pages, $28.99 As history, family lore, and Yiddish fiction all attest, the 19th-century Russian Empire held numerous dangers for Jews in the Pale of Settlement: grinding poverty, pogroms, conscription into the Czar’s army. Sholem Aleichem’s folkloric stories mined this…
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Culture Digging into Holocaust history and finding a sort of gold
Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure By Menachem Kaiser Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 277 pages, $27 Menachem Kaiser’s third-generation Holocaust memoir, in keeping with the genre, is an act of reclamation – or at least an attempt at one. In “Plunder,” Kaiser admits to the limits of his project and confesses his envy…
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